Comment by ergot_vacation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergot_vacation | Hacker News Reader

Conspiracy theories, taken generally, seem to very clearly be an expression of the collective unconscious. Not in the full-on woo-woo way, just "collective unconscious" in the sense of a large population considering a problem or situation instinctively, rather than explicitly and rationally. As such, you usually don't want to take them at face value, but it's also a mistake to discard them completely. They often point to something very real that is going on under the surface. The hard part, like any expression of the subconscious, is trying to separate signal from noise, but there IS a signal there. If there wasn't, the "conspiracy theory" would never catch on.

All that said:

"The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, 'the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.'"

I'd say the "Conspiracy Theorists" are pretty on the money here. It's literally an attempt to take power away from existing governments and deliver it to a cabal of multinational corporations, which is, in effect, the "One World Government" the Theorists love to crow about. And never forget, they've been trying to do this, in some form or another, since at least the 30s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

“Delivering it to a cabal of multinational corporations” is the bad-faith interpretation that only works if you ignore almost everything written on the topic. And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle.

Here’s an example from Wikipedia: “ The final outcome of the Summit, the Tunis Agenda (2005), enshrined a particular type of multistakeholder model for Internet governance, in which, at the urging of the United States, the key function of administration and management of naming and addressing was delegated to the private sector (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN)”

And while ICANN gets criticism as any other organization, few argue the internet would be better served by direct control by any government.

The article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistakeholder_governance, also explains the reasoning behind the idea. Basically, the world has become complicated, and governments are often not familiar with some situation, so they want to involve more of the people close to the issue on decision-making.

“Everything I don’t like is an alt-right dogwhistle”

No. I don't like cats. They're more like old-school fascists than alt-right.

This attitude is insane, and i can't believe how many people on HN exhibit this. The US is going mad and we are watching it like a car crash in slow-motion.

> And “cabal” happens to be an anti-semitic dogwhistle, although I’m sure its use here is just a coincidincle.

Really difficult to take anything else you're saying seriously alongside this.

Surez, anything looks like anything if you use vague enough terms.

But a public document proposing a collaboration between many sectors, is the opposite of a secret plan for a single unified government.

> The hard part, like any expression of the subconscious, is trying to separate signal from noise, but there IS a signal there. If there wasn't, the "conspiracy theory" would never catch on.

So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat and all the governments cooperate to suppress knowledge of this and to block people from going and seeing the ice walls that surround Earth; there are vast networks of tunnels under the US where millions of kidnapped children are tortured and raped before they are harvested alive for their adrenochrome which the communists and satanists the secretly rule the world ingest to stay healthy and live longer; or that most of the worlds leaders have been replaced by aliens (the ET kind); or that Biden, Harris, Pelosi, all of the Supreme Court justices, and many others have already been arrested for treason, tried in military tribunals, and executed, with animitronics/CGI/actors/whatever being put in their place to not tip off the other traitors until the military has dealt with them all, and then will reinstate Trump.

Your post is set up like a straw man, but let’s just take the ‘children are being sexually kidnapped/tortured’ pizza gate thing as an example. It’s absurd, but guys like Jeffrey Epstein exist. And I think we can all agree something very fishy was going on within the circles he operated in and how he died. Underage people are being exploited by some very high profile movers and shakers… but rather than anything substantive, we get this unconscious unfounded unease. Filtered through the cultural milieu, it manifests as unsophisticated paranoid fears tangentially related to sex abuse and the Clintons.

The flat earth stuff is astroturfed disinfo seeded to discredit conspiracy narratives as such (ditto Alex Jones who comes from a CIA connected family); the tunnels and kidnapped children are pointing to vast sex trafficking and blackmail networks which operate outside the law (of which Jeffrey Epstein and the legitimately suspicious Pizzagate emails were just one small glimpse); the alien leadership thing is a stand-in for the fact that essentially everyone in our ruling elite is at such a level of sociopathic remove that they almost fancy themselves a different species from the rest of humanity (which they purely view as a resource to be exploited); and the QAnon thing is another astroturfed disinfo campaign which helped to shield Trump from his Epstein connections and get anyone who is clued into this stuff stuck on their computer deciphering 8chan posts and waiting for the cavalry to arrive (and was also very effective in getting normies to scoff at the idea of unaccountable pedophilia by the ruling elite).

> So what is the signal in such conspiracy theories as the Earth is flat

Psyops, honestly.

Easy to push that theory enough it can be pointed to as the "mAnY cOnSpIraCy theorists believe this" citation.

P.S. The "signal" is that everyday person society often feels like it's being kept from the whole truth, to its detriment — to the point that either the CIA or FSB has convinced swathes of people the fucking Earth is flat with (often disappointing quality!) meme magic.

P.P.S. People//kids are really sex trafficked. Some of them end up being victimized by the elite (sole of whom are pretty weird!). You should know your post really conflates wildly different things!

For the guy I knew who was into flat earth, the signal was that the scientific establishment sometimes lied to him and he didn't have the resources to know when it was and wasn't telling the truth. He didn't seem that interested in the fact that I, a friend he trusted completely, did have those resources in this specific case. Given that behavior, I am not sure how much he really believed the earth was actually flat. Even if he didn't trust the system, he should have been able to trust me. That leads me to think it was about the system, not the literal truth of the matter. It was a statement of distrust in the face of an inability to personally verify, an attitude many of us share when it comes to such things as governments and corporations. It is perfectly true that the scientific establishment does get it wrong sometimes, which must be very creepy when you know you can't tell. For this individual, I think flat earth was an objection and a demonstration of how much trust had been lost and how powerless he was and how impossible it was to establish belief without trust even in such a simple case.

I think the topic of the flat earth, like the topic of the faked moon landings, is not chosen because the evidence is particularly convincing in these cases. It is a shot directly at things perceived to be sacred to science. An insult out of rebellion, not an intellectual assessment of the sufficiency of evidence. I do wonder how much of this psychology plays into the vaccine issue, that also having big elements of perceived sacredness to the distrusted establishment.

Anyway, this is is not the only person I know who is into such egregiously anti-scientific theories. I can think of one other guy in the same boat, and he also is coming from a similar psychological place: not that smart, not that well educated, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the establishment sometimes lies, chooses intellectual rebellion over powerlessness. I am not sure how seriously he believes this stuff either. I am not sure he even knows. I don't think that's the point.

There certainly is a truth to the creepiness of both the intellectual power imbalance and the occasional betrayal of trust. I can feel it too, in fields I don't have time to critique closely.

And indeed, even for those of us who don't go quite so far as to shake our fist in defiance and declare unbelief, the idea of this power imbalance being both extreme and sometimes possibly sinister is so well embedded in the consciousness that it is a recurring trope in our mythology. Dangerous, possibly sinister scientific research, hidden from the public by either lies or intellectual impenetrability, is an extremely common premise in fiction. It reflects this same reality. Perhaps we keep it to fiction, but the stories wouldn't work if we didn't feel it too. A thousand years ago, in Beowulf, Grendel is the product of a curse from God. That made a story work back then. Our monsters now escape from government labs. This tells you something about us, about something we all sort of seriously perceive and fear.

This is the signal behind the conspiracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com